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January 2010 Archive (79 posts)

PHP: Exit a While or For Loop with Break | How do you exit or break out of a running loop before it has finished completing in PHP?
Well luckily PHP makes it pretty easy by providing us with the break control structure, a function that forces the ending of the execution of the current for, ... (Programming)

Cosplay Sundae: Raphael & Sophitia (Soulcalibur) | The Soulcalibur series, one of the best weapons-based fighting game franchises ever released and today's Cosplay Sundae features an absolutely stunning recreation of two of the game's prime characters, virtuous Grecian warrior Sophitia Alexandra and sinister exiled French Nobleman, Raphael Sorel. Both cosplayers have put ... (Cosplay)

jQuery Mouseover Tooltips the Easy Way! | Jeff Robbins of Lullabot brings to us a rather nifty jQuery plugin in the form of BeautyTips, a tooltips plugin which uses the canvas drawing element from the HTML 5 spec to draw tooltips/talk bubbles/help balloons that can be associated with any specific HTML element ... (CodeUnit)

Screenshot Saturday: Bakuretsu Tenshi (Infinity OVA) | Girls, mecha, guns. It's Bakuretsu Tenshi time! And this time Screenshot Saturday is taking a good long peek at the 2007 Infinity OVA of what is a seriously fun series...
I quite enjoyed the original action-packed Bakuretsu Tenshi anime series and thus needless to say, ... (Anime)

The Day Metrorail Tried to Kill Me | I used to be a loyal train commuter for a number of years when I still worked at the University of Cape Town, so I know Metrorail pretty well - still, the last thing I expected was for them to try and kill me a ... (My Life)

Shorten Your URLs the Bit.ly Way! | URL shorteners are all the rage at the moment, made particularly popular by the advent of micro-blogging platforms like Twitter and even FaceBook updates for that matter. The concept is pretty simple. Take a long URL, pass it on to the shortening service and receive ... (CodeUnit)

For the Love of Toast! | So there I was, standing in the kitchen, two fresh slices of white bread in my hand, the Stork margarine out on the counter, the grated cheese standing at the ready and the ham lying lovingly covered by a small piece of plastic (in a ... (My Life)

WordPress Random Posts Widget | Random posts are always fun to throw up onto your blog, as they help encourage readers stick around for that little bit longer and explore the otherwise deep, dark, hidden recesses of your previous mutterings and as such become an invaluable tool if you're trying ... (CodeUnit)

War in Nagua Bay | So this Saturday past I said enough was enough, checked that Chantelle was indeed working on the day and sent out a call to the boys for anyone who wanted to come through and join me for a day of unadulterated gaming, a braai and ... (My Life)

Not a Great Morning Stench | You know what isn't a great smell to try waking up to? Opening your fridge to grab some yoghurt for breakfast and being hit by that overpowering smell of fresh, raw beef that has been sitting in your fridge overnight.
And not just one piece of ... (My Life)

Multi-search Using 3 Search Engines at Once! | Search engines have become an indispensable part of modern life and the Internet, and as such almost all of us have long since determined our own particular favourite amongst the multitude of available workhorses.
However, search engines are not all the same and quite often return ... (CodeUnit)

It's Just One of those Moments | It's quite interesting, but this photo above is actually one of Chantelle's and my favourite images to come out of our wedding back in November last year, despite the fact it doesn't actually feature Chantelle or myself!
Instead, it depicts my sister Claire looking on as ... (My Life)

Highlight a Table Row using jQuery | Using jQuery to highlight a table row on mouse over is pretty simple to achieve, and today I'll quickly demonstrate how you can achieve this neat effect using the addClass and removeClass jQuery functionalities.
First, you need to define your CSS style to be applied to ... (CodeUnit)

Ultimate Bobotie Showdown! | Seeing as we hadn't done it for quite a bit, last Thursday evening Chantelle and I invited our two sets of folks over for supper with us in Gordon's Bay, with Chantelle eagerly piquing her mom's interest by declaring it to be a bobotie evening ... (My Life)

Like Stepping on a Puppy's Tail | Just got back from a quick lunch time gym session now, and I must say, this is the first time I've ever had to watch tennis with the sound on mute! The reason?
Victoria Azarenka.
This 20 year old Belarusian girl must have the most annoying playing ... (Sport & Health)

The House of C 008: Sent Packing | The female species. Seemingly completely incapable of packing sensibly and more importantly, packing in accordance with available space and duration of the trip. Without fail, with every packing opportunity, my dear wife will haul out the biggest bag available and stuff it to the seams, pausing only ... (The House of C)

Schadenfreude: Splitting the Course | Schadenfreude: pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. It's human nature really.
You can talk about staged wardrobe 'malfunctions' like Janet Jackson's infamous Superbowl Stunt all day long if you want, but shame poor Scottish bobsledder Gillian Cooke has to take the cake for experiencing one ... (Jokes & other Funny Stuff | Sport & Health)

Magic Knight Rayearth Cosplay: Alycone (Giorgia Vecchini) | Well known Italian cosplayer Giorgia Vecchini dipped deep into the classics for this one, gracefully stepping out as the mesmerizing Alycone.
CLAMP's Magic Knight Rayearth proved to be a popular hit with anime-watching girls the world around, and so today's Cosplay Sundae takes us back to ... (Cosplay)

Check a PHP File for Syntax Errors from the Command Line | I sometimes find myself having to create PHP scripts from scratch using Nano on a command line only interface on a Ubuntu Linux server. Obviously this kind of sucks if you are used to using a proper error-checking and code hinting full IDE like Aptana ... (CodeUnit)

Screenshot Saturday: Air Gear (Episode 1) | Inline skates on steroids, that's what this is. Air Gear straps them on, takes it to the sky and then beats the crap out of all challengers in this action-packed, laugh-a-minute 2006 shonen hit! This edition of Screenshot Saturday takes a bite out of episode ... (Anime)

jQuery: Add and Remove Element Classes on the Fly | Quite often you achieve altering a specific HTML element's look and feel by assigning it to a particular class, that class already possessing some customised CSS style rules in the document's main stylesheet.
There are of course times when you actually want to achieve this visual ... (CodeUnit)

Funakoshi Karate International South Africa Logo | Because I keep misplacing this damn logo and because it might prove useful to other designers out there, here is a decent quality snapshot of the current Funakoshi Karate International South Africa badge:
Download ZIP file here
Update: Thanks Gerhard for the updated logo! (Martial Arts)

The Never Diminishing Laundry Basket | I think my mom would probably have killed me had I still been living with her and generating the huge amount of laundry that I currently come up with on a daily basis. As it is, I think Chantelle could quite possibly be hating it ... (My Life)

!important CSS: How to force one Style above Another | In CSS, how do you force a particular style declaration to take precedence over all others that have come before or after it?
Remember the very nature of Cascading Style Sheets is to cascade. Hierarchy is important and if a style is read by the browser ... (CodeUnit)

Hats Off to... Rogue Assassin | I caught Rogue Assassin on DSTV the other day and I've got to give kudos to the writers - they seriously caught me off guard with some serious twists in the tale for this ultra violent action fliek.
I must admit, I can't actually fault the ... (My Reviews)

jQuery: Tween from One Color to Another | From jQuery 1.2 onwards, the ability to tween (animate) from one color to another, in other words fade one color into a different color is as simple as inserting one line of code.
(In order to use this effect though, you will need to include the ... (CodeUnit)

The Warm Water Spa and the Cellphone | My dear old father-in-law Monty managed to achieve the quite unthinkable this past weekend (which we spent as a Montgomery Clan getaway to Warmwaterberg Spa just by the way) - he managed to completely soak his cellphone by forgetting it in the pockets of his ... (General Nonsense | My Life)

New Features in jQuery 1.4! | Four years have passed since the initial public release of the stellar jQuery library and in celebration the guys over at jQuery have just released jQuery 1.4, the first major core release for 2010. They're making a pretty big song and dance about the whole ... (CodeUnit)

Righteous Kill... An Opinion | I caught Righteous Kill on DSTV the other day and kind of half-watched it as I faffed around the house cleaning up (this was during our vaunted Spring Cleaning 2010 effort earlier this month). Now what had originally caught the eye of the critics in ... (My Reviews)

The Missing Karl... and the SingStar Link | I'm worried about Karl. I haven't heard from the good Dr. Storbeck in ages now, haven't seen any life of him (apart from newly tagged photos) on FaceBook and haven't come across his name in any ground-breaking scientific journal releases as of late.
What has happened ... (General Nonsense | My Life)

The House of C 007: Axed! | Axed! It's weak I know. But hey, sue me. It's my webcomic and I can run out of good ideas if I want to! So there! :P
But in the interests to keep you on board as a regular reader, please be aware that I hereby solemnly do ... (The House of C)

More Marvel T-Shirt Geekery! | Did I mention that all of a sudden all my t-shirts happen to feature Marvel superhero characters? I don't know how this happened (clue: it was Christmas' fault) but I do know that it is awesome - and I like it! :P
So in no particular ... (Comic Books | My Life)

A jQuery Horizontal Scrolling News Ticker | Gian Carlo Mingati has made life particularly easy for you if you are in search for a simple to implement, yet powerful and customizable side-scrolling (in other words horizontal) news ticker widget.
His liScroll jQuery plugin takes any old unordered (ul) list with a unique ID ... (CodeUnit)

How to Store Decimal Currency Values in MySQL | Now while storing integers and numerals in MySQL is pretty rock solid and easy to do, storing decimal values like currency, in other words money, isn't quite as intuitive when you have a phpMyAdmin structure tab open in front of you.
When it comes to storing ... (CodeUnit)

Cosplay Sundae: Psylocke (X-Men) |
X-Men this week for Cosplay Sundae, and this time around we have cosplay queen Yaya of angelicstar.net fame bringing the delectable British-born Elizabeth Braddock, a.k.a Psylocke to life. Psylocke is a highly skilled martial artist, first believed to be telepathic but then later discovered to ... (Cosplay)

PHP: Simple Try Catch Example | With object orientated languages came the concept of the try-catch block to better manage exceptions and application crashes, and from PHP 5 onwards, the popular web server-side scripting language too adopted this ideology.
By placing code which stands a possible chance of failing within a try ... (CodeUnit)

Screenshot Saturday: Detroit Metal City (Episode 12) | You like Heavy Death Metal? You enjoy anime? You laugh at some pretty outrageous things? If the answer is yes to all three (well okay, you don't have to answer yes for the first one), then there is simply no way you can not enjoy ... (Anime)

Diedrich Bader is... The Batman? | The Drew Carey Show. Anyone remember it? You know, it ran from 1995 to 2004, consisted of 9 seasons made up of 233 episodes in total? Well if you do, do you remember the tall, dark-haired, silly Oswald from the show? You do? Excellent.
Well, Diedrich Bader ... (Moving Pictures Notes)

How to Turn on Caret Browsing | Instead of just using the mouse to select text and move around within a webpage, you can in fact use the standard navigation (arrow and page-) keys on your keyboard to do this, making in particular specific text selection far more targeted and easier to ... (CodeUnit)

Muppet on a T-Shirt: Kermit the Frog | Posted entirely for the sake of Sven and his insatiable love for all things Muppet, I thought it prudent to put up this picture of the t-shirt given to me by Claire and Riley for Christmas and now worn proudly around the home when in ... (My Life)

Online Lorem Ipsum Generator | The Lorem Ipsum dummy text is an invaluable tool to designers as it has a more or less normal distribution of letters and thus creates a far more "readable" design than just using copy pastes of "Content Here" all over the place.
This dummy text has ... (CodeUnit)

Ubuntu: Restart the SMS Server Tools 3 (SMS3) Service | SMS Server Tools 3 or SMS3 is a great piece of SMS Gateway open source software that allows you to send and receive short SMS messages through any number of GSM modem types or mobile phones.
It installs itself as a service on an Ubuntu Linux ... (CodeUnit)

Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats... at the Artscape | I'm not a great theatre lover, I'll easily admit to that, but I do agree that there are some theatre productions and musicals that one simply has to see during their lifetime, as simple as that. And having already seen Phantom and the Opera when ... (My Life | My Reviews)

Ubuntu: List Running Services from a Terminal | I've had to do more work on one of our Ubuntu servers again recently, and without Ubuntu's incredible GUI to fall back on, I'm seriously shocked at just how much Linux knowledge I've lost since moving away from the platform so many years ago already.
Anyway, ... (CodeUnit)

Stomach versus Sunset Spur | I had a good week last week, that I did. Had a good start to work for Touchwork 2010, caught Cats at the Artscape with the Montgomery Clan on Thursday evening and then spent the weekend in Betty's Bay on a Karate Camp with my ... (My Life)

Tiger Claw Clean | Man, what a spring-cleaning drive Chantelle and I have been on as of late! Determined to at last clear up some much needed space in our home pad, Chantelle has been like a tiger set loose upon a big juicy hunk of meat!
Clothes have been ... (My Life)

Cross Platform Regular Expression (RegEx) Tool: RegExr | Regular expressions are plain and simple an enormous headache - but man when you get them to work for you then they are the most powerful guns known to any string-manipulating madman out there.
By now of course there are plenty of great tools to run ... (CodeUnit)

7 Minute Microwave Chocolate Cake Recipe | An absolute disaster it was I tell you. I couldn't find my gran's 7 minute microwave chocolate cake recipe anywhere and not wanting to let Chantelle whom I had promised a cake for down, I did a quick look about on the Internet and turned ... (Recipes)

The House of C 006: They are Always Late! | Women. Nobody gets them, or rather no man understands them. Why is it that no matter how late or delayed they are in getting to any appointment, be it to make the opening of a show or meet the queen, there always seems to be ... (The House of C)

Ubuntu: How to Reboot or Shutdown from the Command Line | If you're using Ubuntu or perhaps another flavour of Linux, there come a time when you need to either reboot (restart) or shutdown a machine via a terminal (command line) or shell command.
Of course, it does come as no surprise that in order to carry ... (CodeUnit)

Cosplay Sundae: Claire Redfield (Resident Evil) |
This week's Cosplay Sundae sees us heading back into the gaming realm, with a brilliant cosplay by talented deviantART-active model, pheonix-blood. She's playing the part of Claire Redfield, one of the heroines from the hugely popular Resident Evil survival-horror franchise. Claire Redfield herself is the ... (Cosplay)

Screenshot Saturday: Michiko to Hatchin (Episode 1) | Michiko to Hatchin is one roller-coaster of a ride in terms of anime series, always keeping fresh, always pulling out the surprises and genuinely managing to stay original and thoroughly enjoyable. Hence it is no wonder it managed to sneak in for a Screenshot Saturday ... (Anime)

Investigate when a Windows Server Lost Power | Our server room went down the other day and I was called upon to investigate at what time more or less did the room actually lose power.
Now the easiest way to figure this one out is to investigate on the Windows 2003 Server machine, making ... (CodeUnit)

Preview MP3 Music Files in Ubuntu | Ubuntu has for a while now (and this is still to be found in the latest Karmic Koala release) included an extremely nifty and helpful little built in preview tool that is aimed squarely at music files like the classic MP3 format for example.
And to ... (CodeUnit)

Rainbow Skellums | Undoubtedly, Leon Schuster is South Africa's king of the candid camera type movie and it will be many a year before his plethora of movie laughs at the expense of unsuspecting suckers will ever be passed, but that's not to say that no one is ... (My Reviews)

Internet Explorer: Restore File Download Dialog | If you're still using Windows XP (hey, not everyone can afford to just upgrade willy nilly), today's little tutorial is specifically for you.
If in the past you've accidentally unchecked that little box reading "Always ask before opening this type of file" when trying to save ... (CodeUnit)

Kirsty, Come Sit Over Here | So let it be known that Chantelle and I started 2010 off by heading out on Saturday January the 2nd and purchasing our very first sofa set, with the delivery date set at February 15. This is a huge moment for me, because this marks ... (My Life)

Sitting in Traffic | Bliksem, I sat in traffic for 2 whole hours last night trying to get home from work! O.o
The reason?
Cape Town's scorching heat which seemed to have sent everyone straight to the beaches - seriously though, doesn't anyone work in Cape Town any more? :P
Baden Powell ... (My Life)

Burning Her In | I mentioned previously in these here pages that Chantelle surprised me with a proper man's braai this Christmas, and after giving it its final protective paint coat, I decided to at last set it forth on its maiden burning, seeing as this Saturday past was ... (My Life)

Where do I find that old Word 2003 Command in Word 2007? | Microsoft's word editing platform Word 2003 was around for many years and is to this day still being used in many an office around the world. However, Microsoft did of course replace it back in 2007 with the updated Word 2007 which formed part of ... (CodeUnit)

Daily Annoyance: Gero Yoghurt | To me yoghurt is yoghurt, I eat any brand of the stuff (though I do prefer the smooth ones to the chunky types, I'll admit to that), but it would seem that Chantelle has a penchant for Gero yoghurt, the low fat, diabetic friendly yoghurt ... (General Nonsense | My Life)

Webcomics on WordPress: ComicPress! | By now, we are all familiar with WordPress, the blogging platform that literally revolutionized the web and placed the role of content creator into the hands of millions of everyday, casual users. Funnily enough though, WordPress also lends itself as the ideal way of publishing ... (CodeUnit)

Out with 2009 and in with 2010 | Well, I'm currently back at the grindstone, having started work on Monday again (and my first day was spent on tech support trying to bring all our systems back up seeing as we ran out of electricity on the same day at around 03:00 in ... (My Life)

Wordpress 2.9.1 Officially Released | I see the guys at WordPress sneaked 2.9.1 live this morning, with this quickfire release attending to a number of annoying glitches and bugs brought in by the big 2.9 release that just happened a few weeks earlier.
As per usual, you can download it from ... (CodeUnit)

A Long Walk | Actually, over the course of this past stretch of leave, I did in fact discover a great new little exercise routine to keep me busy and my blood pumping over all those days spent alone at the pad in Gordon's Bay - I shall call ... (My Life)

The House of C 005: Dark Knight | This one came out round about the time that the latest Batman movie, Dark Knight was first released and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only cartoonist to use the "dark night" wordplay, that's for sure!
Still, I kind of like the brush stroke colouring on ... (The House of C)

Ubuntu: Batch Resize Your Images using GIMP | Digital Cameras these days take fantastically detailed and large photos, brilliant for printing and editing but not always that great if you want to simply pop them up on the web for everyone on FaceBook to gaggle over. So obviously a spot of resizing is ... (CodeUnit)

Ubuntu Keyboard/Mouse Shortcut: Folder Icon Zoom | Probably not an Earth-shattering Ubuntu keyboard/mouse combo shortcut for today's CodeUnit post, but it is quite a useful one to know and it is pretty widely adopted as a kind of a standard, particularly seeing as Windows also allows for the same kind of zooming ... (CodeUnit)

Ficus Standing Tall | Amazingly enough, contrary to Terrance's utterances as one of the Best Men at our wedding, we have managed to keep something alive for longer than a week. As you can see from my painstakingly gained proof, Ficus still stands proud and tall at our back ... (My Life)

Using jQuery with other Javascript Libraries: jQuery.noConflict |
You'll often find yourself using frameworks that may be running a number of different javascript libraries such as MooTools, jQuery and ProtoType (depending on the various involved developers' plugin preferences of course), which leaves you with the interesting quandry of what to do with the ... (CodeUnit)

Fix WordPress 2.9: Install 2.9.1 Release Candidate 1! | At least the guys at WordPress haven't been sitting back and doing nothing about the horrible host of bugs they introduced with their latest WordPress 2.9 upgrade and have scurried to knock together a 2.9.1 Release Candidate 1 package that addresses many of the issues ... (CodeUnit)

A Trojan in Our Midst | Well, the new year is now upon us and like most, I'm sure you already have that scrap of paper with all your new year resolutions tucked neatly under the phonebook, just in case you accidentally lay eyes on it again come the end of ... (My Life | Sport & Health)